Now on jacobchristensen.eu

Day: 2008-07-09

It is not really surprising that Swedish voters according to a poll by Synovate Temo have very different images of the Social Democrats and the Conservatives, but that a whooping 70% of voters declare that the Conservatives are “on the side of the rich” should be a cause for some concern for Messrs Reinfeldt, Borg and Schlingman.

Some more observations: If the Conservative “rich people’s party” brand is very strong (it may be a good or a bad ting), the Social Democrats’ brand is less focused with trygghet as the strongest value at around 50%. The Swedish term trygghet is difficult to translate directly into English: My dictionary suggests safety, security, peace of mind and confidence as English equivalents.

Also, the Conservatives may be the rich people’s party but 49% of voters see the party as oriented towards the future. Only 33% say the same about the Social Democrats.

Finally, when it comes to competence, 45% say the Social Democrats show governmental competence against only 35% for the Conservatives.

I’d love to see somebody break down these numbers because I have a feeling that the Swedish voters’ view of the parties is not quite consistent. It would also be interesting to discuss the potential markets among voters for different parties. And: How does the relationship with the Left and Green Parties influence Social Democratic chances? Unlike the partners of the Conservatives, these parties have never been in government and the Social Democrats would prefer to keep them out of office.

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I think it is safe to say that I never had much of a career plan. If I had had such a plan, I would surely have skipped academia and taken that job in the Danish Health Ministry back in 1993. The pay would have been just as good and the career prospects even better. (You didn’t know about that? Well, now the truth is out).

Anyway, looking at the PolSci profession from the periphery, either in the structural sense (back when I worked in Copenhagen) or the geographical sense (during my time in Umeň), the academic job market always appeared a bit opaque, partly because I belong to an in-between generation as the Danish academic system started undergoing major changes during the mid-1990s. In the end I’ve mainly stuck to doing things, I thought were interesting even if they involved a very strong element of career suicide. I mean, seriously: Why would a political scientist ever want to write a historical biography, for crying out loud?

Even worse: I wrote the thing in … you can hear the bureaucrats go “Ewww: Worthless” … Danish.

As the years pass, it is also obvious that the institutional and political environment changes. At times, there is excess demand for academic staff (Sweden in the late 1990s, for instance), at other times there is a strong excess supply. Developments aren’t synchronous between disciplines – history can be in the doldrums while PolSci is having a ball – and the signals from above change. These days our insectpolitical and administrative overlords in Denmark as well as the other Scandinavian countries want research published as articles in great quantities in English-language peer-reviewed journals (available to academic libraries only at immense cost) which can be immediately turned into production goods or used in the political process. In fact, in Scandinavia our overlords, regardless of political colour, see academic departments as units of routine mass production (students and papers), not as units of research and development.

And then there is the career structure. Politicians have networks and bureaucrats have careers. Academics, not really. Back in the 1850s S°ren Kierkegaard wrote a parody of a Danish clergyman’s road to salvation noting that it included nothing by administrative detours and in a way it is the same with academia. The bureaucrats in the Ministry of Science who control us would certainly never accept these kinds of working conditions.